Are You Truly Customer-Friendly? or Are You Leaving That to Your Competitors?

Developing a dynamic and cohesive marketing strategy has become essential for your business if you want to profit in today’s competitive marketplace.  In particular, you need to implement strong digital marketing strategies to be successful, as your customers are increasingly turning to the internet to perform their purchase decisions.

Leading businesses are increasing their marketing budgets. According to the fifth annual Marketing Budgets Report:

• 77% of companies stated they will be increasing their content marketing budgets in 2014
• 65% stated they will be increasing their search engine optimization (SEO) budgets in 2014, and
• 62% stated they will be increasing their mobile marketing budgets in 2014.

Customer-Friendly Content Marketing is Essential for Leading Marketers

High-quality content  is now increasingly vital to the success of businesses, as consumers use search engines to look for products and services, and find the answers to their queries. Leads on the lookout for particular products and services use the internet as their first port of call; they check out business websites and social media profiles and sign up for newsletters to get more valuable information.

According to research, 90% of B2C marketers are using content marketing this year. Furthermore, 60% of B2C marketers are planning to increase their content marketing budget over the next 12 months. Of this percentage, 15% are planning to significantly increase their content marketing budgets over the next 12 months.

As for B2B marketers, the research shows that 93% of B2B marketers are using content marketing now. 58% of B2B marketers are planning to increase their content marketing budget over the next 12 months, while more B2B marketers are planning to increase their content marketing budgets in 2014.

All B2B marketers are planning to increase their content marketing spending at similar rates. Meanwhile, more small companies (with 10-99 employees) than large companies (with 1,000 or more employees) are planning to increase their content marketing budgets over the next 12 months (60% versus 52%).

SEO Uses Content to Differentiate Your Business from Your Competitors

The purpose of off-page SEO is to create branding, content, promotion, press releases and competitive back-links to your site – all aimed at differentiating your business from your competitors and making you very customer-friendly.

Patterson Digital Marketing covers both on-page and off-page SEO with specialists in each aspect doing the work.  We will write marketing content for your website covering branding, product information, company and industry news, press releases and build competitive backlinks to your site, specifically:

• promotional content will contain promos, coupons, sales and current discounts you offer 
• we create blog posts that your prospects want to share with their friends
• we create press releases, company updates and industry news that make your prospects more interested in your products and services
• we want your prospects to think positively about your brand
• custom quality content has a positive effect on audience attitude say 90% of Chief Marketing Officers
• we utilise Google+ to improve your overall SEO footprint as the accumulation of G+ authorship credits helps you to rank higher in search
• we ensure everyone knows about new content on your blog or anywhere online
• we ensure that when we publish content about you, everyone in your social world and beyond will know about it
• we set up accounts for you in the top social media and social sharing sites, the top blogs and the top press release sites
• because of the high quality content we create, we are able to attract natural links
• authority sites are more likely to link back to your site and therefore pass link juice to your pages
• the more quality links we build to your site, the higher your website will rank, the more visitors you will get which will result in higher sales and profit.

Not Mobile Ready = Not Customer Friendly: Get a Mobile-Responsive Website

A study by Sterling Research and SmithGeiger for Google found that a whopping 96% of users have encountered a website that is obviously not designed for mobile. This would not have mattered to you if not for the following findings also uncovered by the same study:

• 52% of users are unlikely to engage with a company whose website brought them a bad mobile experience
• 36% of respondents say a non-mobile-friendly site wastes users’ time
• 67% of users are more likely to purchase if the site is mobile friendly

To add to business owners’ growing woes, Internet research company comScore estimates that 52.4 million Americans now own nearly 58 million tablets. Another research group, Pew Internet, says 56% of American adults have a smartphone. New Zealand consumers also have high rates of ownership.  Worldwide, there will be 1.4 billion smartphones by the end of 2014.

Take note that these devices will be connected to the Internet. Cisco estimates mobile Internet usage will skyrocket at a pace of 66% in the next five years.  Needless to say, Internet users – including your prospective customers – have been and will be viewing your website using mobile devices. That’s 70% of the market and it’s a major problem if your site is not designed to load properly on mobile. You’re limiting your business to 30% of the online market.

Become Customer-Friendly to Be a Market Leader

To expand their brands, leading businesses increase their sales and grow their businesses quickly by increasing their overall marketing budgets, especially in digital channels like content marketing, search engine optimization, mobile marketing, email marketing and social media marketing. The majority of your competitors are increasing their budgets in those channels.

We’re really strong advocates for content marketing, SEO mobile marketing, email marketing and social media marketing (esp Facebook marketing and targeted ads, Google +, YouTube and blogs).  Most websites have far too little content in them and they suffer from a low page rank and low page clicks for this reason.  Customers value informative content.

Your digital marketing budget should be recouped with just a few extra sales each month.  We link your marketing budget with targets for leads and sales to ensure the spend results in a positive ROI.  Our digital marketing products secure leads from all the online media channels and direct them to your website. We track your website leads by channel in real time so action can be taken to optimize performance and your ROI.

Email us at chris@pattersondigitalmarketing.com or call us now at (09) 449 1005 or (027) 489 5009 to make your business customer-friendly using content marketing, SEO, social media and mobile marketing. 

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Chris Kirkham